Tag Archives | Electricity

If you’re going to spend a lot on fancy coffee, you should at least get that coffee in a fun and/or interesting way.

Enter: The Velopresso

The Velopresso is a coffee cart on wheels, designed to stay off the grid while enabling a single barista to run the entire operation. The cart itself was designed from the ground up around a custom rear-steer tricycle, a unique pedal-driven grinder, and a robust gas-fired lever espresso machine. The result is a fusion of human power, sensory pleasures and technology – old tech meets new tech, pedal power meets caffeine power, and engineering meets aesthetics.

And since there’s no motors to run or electricity needed, the Velopress doesn’t make a lot of noise, meaning you can have your coffee in relative silence as you enjoy the scenery around you.

If you’re interested in buying your own Velopresso, they’re taking pre-orders in early Summer of 2013, though the company is based out of the UK, so you may need to factor in some shipping if your coffee dreams take you elsewhere.

The Places We Live is a fascinating look at some of the poorest slums on earth.

It’s the work of Jonas Bendiksen, who traveled to Caracas, Venezuela; Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya; Dharavi, Mumbai, India; and Jakarta, Indonesia from 2005 to 2007, documenting life in these slums, and capturing images of the diversity of personal histories and outlooks found in these dense neighborhoods that, despite commonly held assumptions, are not simply places of poverty and misery.

The site does really well at simulating the experience of living in the slums, and you can listen to a narration of numerous different stories told by the people who lived them as you examine their home and listen to the sounds of the slums all around you.

In addition to the website, Jonas has also published a book that includes 20 double-gatefold images, each representing an individual home and its denizens’ stories.

What has eight wheels, eight motors, four wheel steering, runs on electricity, and accelerates faster than a Corvette?

The Eliica (which stands for Electric Lithium-Ion Car) was conceived by Hiroshi Shimizu and designed by a team at Keio University in Japan, and supposedly can go up to 200 miles per charge, and tops out at more than 230 mph.

It reaches those amazing speeds through the use of eight electric motors, each generating 80 hp and powering its own wheel (for a total of 640 horsepower!) and though only two are currently in existence, the team hopes to build 200 of them once it can find a corporate sponsor.

200 mph in an electric car that seats four and will go 200 miles before needing a change?